[5785] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Atlanta-NAP's choice of switch
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Heiliger)
Sat Oct 26 23:17:13 1996
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 20:12:30 -0700 (PDT)
From: Jonathan Heiliger <loco@isi.net>
Reply-To: Jonathan Heiliger <loco@isi.net>
To: Darin Wayrynen <darin@good.net>
cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <199610270242.TAA23660@indy.good.net>
On Sat, 26 Oct 1996, Darin Wayrynen wrote:
|} Which begs a question: why use a Giga-switch at all?
|}
|} With the head of line blocking feature/problem and scalability only to
|} full duplex 100 mbps is a Gigaswitch something that should be used in a
|} next generation NAP?
Nathan mentioned that MFS has started their new MAEs with a Catalyst or
shared FDDI ring. Perhaps that has something to do with inital demand.
An example of this is MAE-Houston or MAE-LA, neither of which presently
require the bandwidth a Gigaswitch delivers. MFS has been sticking to the
plan of adding hardware and/or capacity based on demand and traffic stats.
I think the Atlanta NAP, while probably a good idea, won't run into the
head of line blocking problem in the extremely near future. Looking at
the growth pattern of other exchange points leads me to believe this.
|} I'm not suggesting it's intended to be the next generation NAP, but
|} you'd think that they would want to use the latest switches and
|} technology available, rather than continue down the FDDI road.
What else would you suggest? Gigabit Ethernet hasn't been standardized
yet, Cisco doesn't make a HIPPI interface, and some people prefer to not
use ATM. FDDI has proven to very reliable, etc. Having ISPs continue to
grow egress bandwidth has shown to be a bigger problem than the switch
fabric at the larger exchange points.
-jh-
